Many things are stranger than fiction, especially Julian Cope. Subtitled Rome Wasn't Burned in a Day, this three-night seasonette promises "proto-metal, underground grooves" and "music of shamanistic powers" as well as such phantasmagorical occurrences as Vibracathedral Orchestra and Sunburned Hand of the Man.
But Cope is quite enough trouble on his own, always assuming it really is Cope. He emerged wearing grey camouflage fatigues and shiny stack-heeled boots, his face hidden by a full beard and moustache and yellow plastic sunglasses, with red, white and blue stripes painted on his forehead. Later he refined the ensemble by adding a camouflage cap. In a rough, growling voice, he declared his new persona to be that of an American from the deep south, perhaps some kind of biker-survivalist who makes his own bows and arrows and hunts raccoons for breakfast. I spent half the set concerned that I might be attending the wrong gig, or "happening". Only the fact that the fellow had an unhealthy familiarity with Cope's material and appeared to be barking mad eventually persuaded me otherwise.
Cope's four-piece band wasted no time in launching into a sustained barrage of extended pumping rhythms, screeching sheet-metal guitar conspiring with Holy McGrail's synthesizer in a demoralising train-wreck of sound. The lanky, long-limbed Cope strode around the stage as if he were practising for a fight sequence in The Matrix, bellowing into his headset microphone. "This one has a tune," he declared by way of introduction to Like a Motherfucker, although it didn't. But no matter, because by now Cope had bounded off the stage and was terrorising people in the stalls by leering and gesticulating at them.
The deluge continued with Hanging Out and Hung Up on the Line, Get in Your Pretty Face, and White Van. "You know what I love about these fucking songs?" Cope said. "They all sound exactly the fucking same." The event terminated with a 20-minute Reynard the Fox, a pretext for a Cope rant ending in repeated cries of: "Education!!!" Which is what it had been.
· Ends tonight. Box office: 08700 500 511.
